{"id":57685,"date":"2013-08-12T15:15:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T19:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=57685"},"modified":"2019-01-08T17:22:03","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T22:22:03","slug":"in-the-ninth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/12\/in-the-ninth\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Ninth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On Sunday I went to see the Yankees play the Detroit Tigers.\u00a0It was a throwback to the Yankees teams of my childhood, with Andy Pettitte on the mound, cap still low, glowering.\u00a0I\u2019ve always been (and always will be) a Met fan, which is its own portion of anxiety, and the Yankees glittered out there in the Bronx, Pettitte and Jeter and company so much more put together and reliable than the Mets.\u00a0A note on the gigantic screen in center field informed us that Pettitte had pitched for the Yankees in his twenties, thirties, and forties.\u00a0My friend sitting next to me noted that you could hardly see what the score was\u2014the numbers were that inconspicuous\u2014though the advertising, of course, dwarfed it all.<\/p>\n<p>Strangest was watching Alex Rodriguez play, a man who has been so under the popular microscope recently for performance-enhancing drug use as to have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/08\/05\/sports\/baseball\/bedeviled-by-lifes-curveballs-rodriguez-misses-the-guideposts.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">articles<\/a> considering his upbringing.\u00a0Who thought that steroids were still a discussion?\u00a0That felt like years ago too.\u00a0Rodriguez is facing the longest nonlifetime ban in baseball history.\u00a0But for some time, during this purgatory, until the appeals process wraps up, he\u2019ll be playing nine innings a day in the Bronx and the other cities that this itinerant fourth-place circus travels to.\u00a0My friend mentioned, as Rodriguez took the field for the first time, that he thought he remembered something about Rodriguez saying how he couldn\u2019t hear the boos in the crowd these days, because they were mixed with so much cheering. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>From up where we were sitting in Yankee Stadium, third base looked like an unbelievably large area for the old cat to cover, though maybe it was just because he was cheating a little backwards to save a step; you know the stands were built as close to the line as they could have been, the Boss packing us in to the House He Built.\u00a0His black banner, 1930\u20132010, out in center, is the only thing as big as the advertisements.\u00a0A-Rod made a very nice pickup and long throw to get Iglesias in the second, but in the third he fumbled a dribbler, his wide back wallowing.\u00a0He handed the unsuccessful ball, stoically, to Pettitte, who left his glove there waiting.<\/p>\n<p>At the plate things looked better for Rodriguez: it was 1995 and he was a skinny shortstop playing for a different team, joking around with Jeter, a rival (injured now, heading back to Tampa for a rehab stint).\u00a0For his first at-bat, the scoreboard flashed his lifetime stats\u2014among active major leaguers, an astonishing first in home runs, runs, RBIs, and second in hits (to his good friend Derek).\u00a0He didn\u2019t take long to pole one down the left-field line for another home run, his 648th\u2014left field is nearly as close as the junky Little-League distance the Boss installed for the right-field line, 314 feet away.\u00a0Rodriguez acknowledged the crowd, or the sky, in an anti\u2013Ted Williams way, before he resumed his seat in the dugout, as the crowd cheered and booed him.\u00a0Later, lining a single down the right-field line, he at first thought it was a foul ball, far up in the stands.\u00a0The man hits with sunglasses on, that should tell you something.<\/p>\n<p>Rodriguez wasn\u2019t the star of the game\u2014Brett Gardner made an against-the-wall catch and hit a walk-off home run in the ninth, a nice shot, even though it was over that short porch in right.\u00a0The nineties crew didn\u2019t fare particularly well.\u00a0Youthful Pettitte only made it four and a third.\u00a0Midgame, with the Yankees comfortably ahead, before Mariano Rivera, that other stalwart, blew the ninth inning lead and they had to rely on Gardner, who I suppose is this generation\u2019s Yankee\u2014sometime before then, before I took the subway home listening to a father explain Detroit\u2019s bankruptcy to his son, the scoreboard flashed a montage of Roger Maris footage, going for the single-season record for home runs.\u00a0It almost felt insulting to Rodriguez, who is playing here until the guillotine falls.\u00a0I looked down at him at third, to see if he was watching, but of course that would have been unprofessional.\u00a0He had his head down, his cleats kicking and cleaning the dirt at what is still his position.<\/p>\n<p><em>Mark Chiusano\u2019s collection of stories, <\/em>Marine Park<em>, will be published by Penguin in July 2014. His stories and essays have appeared in <\/em>Narrative Magazine<em>,<\/em> Harvard Review<em>, and online at <\/em>Tin House<em> and <\/em>The Huffington Post<em>, among other places.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; On Sunday I went to see the Yankees play the Detroit Tigers.\u00a0It was a throwback to the Yankees teams of my childhood, with Andy Pettitte on the mound, cap still low, glowering.\u00a0I\u2019ve always been (and always will be) a Met fan, which is its own portion of anxiety, and the Yankees glittered out there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":554,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[931],"tags":[9020,375,11590,85],"class_list":["post-57685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-sports","tag-alex-rodriguez","tag-baseball","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-sports"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>In the Ninth by Mark Chiusano<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 12, 2013 \u2013 &nbsp; 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